Manhattan’s Le Bernardin, Owners Hit with Class Action Over Alleged Sexual Harassment, Tip Credit Abuses [UPDATE]

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[Update: The lawsuit detailed on this page was dismissed without prejudice on May 17, 2018. The plaintiff agreed to drop her lawsuit, Reuters reports, citing a letter from the woman’s counsel filed in Manhattan federal court.]

Le Bernardin and its owners are the defendants in a proposed class action lawsuit in which the plaintiff claims she was sexually harassed while working at the Manhattan fine dining establishment, with her complaints of the supposed behavior allegedly ignored or resulting “in the complainer being shamed by the restaurant’s management.” The plaintiff’s suit stems from her allegation that she was body-shamed shortly after giving birth by one of the individual defendants, who the case says is in charge of Le Bernardin’s front-of-house service staff, and was not accommodated after asking the restaurant to work lunch shifts so she could spend evenings with her newborn child. 

“This was plainly a reasonable accommodation, as lunch shifts are generally less desirable shifts among the waitstaff because they earn less in tips than they do during dinner shifts,” the complaint reads. “Nevertheless, [the defendants] refused to accommodate [the plaintiff’s] request, effectively pushing her out of her job.”

According to the lawsuit, the plaintiff complained several times to Le Bernardin’s general manager of sexual harassment from male employees, claiming that she was touched inappropriately by captains at the restaurant on two occasions. The woman then claims that, in another incident, she was called a whore by kitchen employees who “taunted her about a sexual assault she endured” and claimed she made up the episode. Things at Le Bernardin did not improve for the plaintiff after that, the lawsuit says:

“To make things worse, [the general manager] conducted a meeting with several Le Bernardin employees. At the meeting [the general manager] told kitchen employees not to speak to [the plaintiff] at all ‘because she is a dangerous person and a lawsuit waiting to happen.’

As a result of that meeting, [the plaintiff] became a pariah at the restaurant and many employees completely ignored her.

[The plaintiff] was humiliated and distraught by this awful predicament.”

The defendants did nothing to accommodate the plaintiff once she became pregnant, the lawsuit continues. The plaintiff claims, for instance, that she was not allowed to take a break for a few minutes or eat a small snack, and was never provided with a maternity-sized uniform, which the complaint says she was required to buy on her own without reimbursement.

After the plaintiff returned to work in March 2015, the manager defendant, the lawsuit claims, allegedly put his hand on the woman’s stomach and said, “Are you planning on losing weight?” an incident the woman says resulted in her leaving the restaurant in tears.

The plaintiff goes on to allege the defendants paid her and other waitstaff pursuant to an incorrectly applied tip credit, resulting in the workers making less than the federal minimum wage and receiving improperly calculated overtime wages. The woman further asserts the defendants violated the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) by requiring service employees to share a portion of their tips with an employee with “significant managerial authority.”